Associate Editors: Wolfgang BEHR University of Zürich, Yueguo GU Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zev HANDEL University of Washington, C.-T. James HUANG Harvard University and James MYERS National Chung Cheng University

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the languages of China and the different ways in which they are and have been studied. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the languages spoken in China, today and in the past, from many different angles, as well as the different linguistic traditions they have been investigated in.

Báihuà 白話, lit. ‘clear speech’ or ‘unadorned speech’ refers to Vernacular Chinese, a written language that is opposed to
wényán 文言, lit. ‘literary speech’ or ‘ornate speech’, Literary Chinese or Classical Chinese. The term
báihuà mainly denominates: 1. A non-standard vernacular style found in written sources from the Táng until the Qīng dynasty which is thought to have been closer to the spoken language than the dominant literary standard at the time (
wényán). In this sense, the meaning of
báihuà overlaps with "Early Modern Chinese" (
Jìndài Hànyǔ 近代漢語). 2. A written language clo…

1. General 1.1 Geographic distribution The Bái 白 language is primarily spoken by the Bái people in Yúnnán Province, chiefly located in Dàlǐ 大理 Autonomous Prefecture. It is also spoken by other ethnic groups (such as the Lìsù 傈僳, Yí 彝, Nàxī 納西) living in that area with the Bái. Besides the majority of the Bái people, there are two other important groups of Bái speakers, the Lèmò 勒墨 and the Lāmǎ 拉瑪. The Lèmò people mainly live along the Nù 怒 river, while the Lāmǎ people are primarily found along the Lá…

1. Introduction Sentences marked with the morpheme
bèi 被 in Mandarin are known as “
bèi-sentences”, which are to some extent comparable to passive sentences in English. The morpheme
bèi occurs before the agent NP, such as (1), where
Lǐ Sì 李四 is the agent NP and
Zhāng Sān 張三 is the patient NP. When the agent NP is absent,
bèi precedes the verb, as in (2). In what follows, the former is referred to as a long
bèi-sentence while the latter is referred to as a short
bèi-sentence, and
bèi is glossed as “bei” in all the examples. 1. 張三被李四批評了。 Zhāng Sān bèi Lǐ Sì pīpíng le. Zhāng Sān bei Lǐ Sì critic…

1. General Běijīng Mandarin (Běijīnghuà 北京話, Pekingese, hereafter BM) is a language spoken in the city of Běijīng (Peking) by its natives. The development of BM in this definition is essentially influenced by two factors: the special status as capital that the city enjoyed almost uninterruptedly for nearly a millennium, and the normative language(s) of its successive ruling elites. Situated for many centuries in the borderlands between China proper and the Altaic peoples to its north, the predecessor cities of present-day Běijīng served as capital to m…